Storage Small- and Medium-Sized Business Storage:

Small- and Medium-Sized Business Storage

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have special challenges when it comes to implementing and maintaining storage systems. This guide gives SMBs information on deploying NAS, iSCSI SANs, disk arrays and remote storage services.

Network attached storage (NAS) isn't just for the enterprise. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) are also challenged to meet growing file-based data storage requirements. While basic NAS principles are exactly the same regardless of your business size, SMBs have different NAS needs. This chapter outlines the pros and cons of NAS for SMBs.

The challenge for an SMB is to implement and manage data protection. For SMBs that don't have the staff or budget to handle complex data protection in-house, third-party storage services provide a cost-effective alternative.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) have stayed away from SAN implementations in the past because of the expense and complexity of Fibre Channel technologies. However, the introduction of iSCSI has started a shift in SMB storage. The use of Ethernet translates to lower cost, easier maintenance and simpler management for SANs. Today, SMB users can run block-based applications, such as databases at performance levels that rival Fibre Channel SANs.

Disk arrays aren't just for the enterprise anymore, and small and medium-sized business (SMB) users are now taking advantage of the many technologies and capabilities that were once available to only the largest businesses.